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22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found

ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.

9 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Standard IT issues by TheDarkener · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues" - Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel

    Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?

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  2. Re:Love the spin by sphealey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at
    > pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while
    > being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.

    Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.

    And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.

    sPh

  3. Re:Love the spin by CannonballHead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history.

    Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)

    To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.

    I agree.

    And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this:

    It's certainly not impossible; and while investigating is fine and I don't have a problem with that, many seem to run rampant with conspiracy theories based on nothing more than the fact that they don't know (even though with some of them, we probably do know, but it doesn't suit their particular political bent - whether R. or D.).

    I was primarily venting because I get tired of - and not you, apparently - various people attacking Bush (or Obama, for that matter) as being both exceedingly cunning/educated/knowledgeable-about-everything-going-on and stupid/ignorant/high-school-dropout. Slightly exaggerated, depending on who you talk to. "My" side - since conservatives tend to be Republicans - do it with Obama, too. Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country, to completely ruin the country economically and to ruin health care, all the while being ignorant, inept, and completely inexperienced.

    I actually disagree very strongly with Obama on many issues... unfortunately, when many people disagree, they get angry; and when angry, they apparently don't think rationally and start accusing of even contradictory things....

  4. Re:20 million? Hard to believe! by SpaceLifeForm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That happens when you change from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.

    It is amazing that this many were recoverable at all.

    Perhaps someone in IT considered the possibility that the
    migration to Exchange would fail, and kept feeding all of the
    e-mails to another set of servers for, you know, safekeeping.

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    You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
  5. Re:20 million? Hard to believe! by varmittang · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't forget CC emails probably count as multiples. So say one person sends an email and CCs 9 others, that 10 emails in total. Then you possibly need to include the Sent folder, so add another email on top of that. Making 11 emails in total for just one sent email in this situation.

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  6. Re:Love the spin by sphealey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.

    sPh

  7. I knew this was coming by modemboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I knew this was coming when I first heard about the White House scrapping their previous GroupWise based email archiving system, as they were switching to Exchange, and deciding to roll their own archiving system.
    Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, email archiving is big business now and you can buy enterprise ready solution from the likes of EMC.
    Instead they decided to have a private contractor roll a custom system, spent a couple hundred million and 2 years, and then scrapped it for not working right (scrapped by the White House CIO).
    In the end they implemented an EMC solution, right before Bush left office.
    They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.
    Supporting facts: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm

  8. Re:Love the spin by ArcherB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.

    sPh

    If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. Remember Dick Armitage?

    However, I will say that the administration didn't want an investigation into that leading to something else. I remember another president was being investigated for something he was cleared of (Whitewater) and ended up getting into trouble from something completely unrelated (Lewinski).

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    There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
  9. Re:Love the spin by MillenneumMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was stunned by your quotation of Bush. I had never heard anything like that before and agree that such a statement coming from a sitting President (or even a former President) would be very disturbing. I followed the link, read the article, and noticed that the author did not cite ANY sources of this comment. I noticed he also attached outrageous statements to other administration officials, also without citing any references. I searched the internet could not find any other sources for any of the author's claims, other than repetition of the same article you linked to. I must conclude that the writer of that article is not telling the truth and you have been duped. If there had been any truth to this kind of statement, other media would have latched onto this. I am not saying there aren't numerous other reasons to despise Bush, it simply appears that this one didn't actually happen.